![]() When reminiscing about this decade, it’s fashionable to talk about what a great time it was to be a teenager, but it wasn’t quite as swinging as it’s made out to be. It was a heady time to be a teenager, not only had we won the World Cup, British music ruled the airwaves. ![]() In 1966, when Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy, it felt like a victory for the Hammers, as well as England. Like most teenagers, we were football mad I supported West Ham, and an ‘Iron’, through and through. We were a new generation, with a new attitude, and the first teenagers that could do their own thing. In came a ‘New Model Army’, the MODS, with their smart, short haircuts, dressed in sharp, Ivy League Mohair suits, with a dash of European flair, Desert boots, and scooters. The music of the sixties influenced a new generation and, like a turbo charged Dyson cleaner, out went Rock ‘n’ Roll, motorcycles, and greasy haircuts. Like most switched on kids of my generation, I listened to the new wave of Britpop, which snowballed rapidly, and sounded the death knoll for the artists from the fifties. ![]() As I look back at where I came from, it’s hard to believe what has happened. In many ways, my lifestyle mirrored that of the fans that followed The Jam, The Style Council, and Paul Weller’s long, and never ending solo career. Please enable JavaScript if you would like to comment on this blog.When I was growing up on a notorious Council estate in South-East London, during the sixties, I had no inkling of my future. Regardless, it's an awesome tune that I forcibly crammed onto many a mixtape that summer, bookended incongruously by tracks by T.S.O.L., Killing Joke, Naked Raygun and the Smiths.Ĭrank it up and enjoy your summer while you can. Lee and drummer Steve White escape with any semblance of dignity. And is that lipstick he's sporting? Only lovely backing vocalist Dee C. While he'll always be a figure of untouchable coolness in my book, here he is looking like an blind, emaciated Italian bicycle pimp. Watch as he strains to look emphatic and committed at the piano, gritting his teeth keenly and looking more as if he'd been sternly informed that he would only be permitted to use the restroom after the video was complete. The video, however, is another story, one that only reinforces the pain felt by die-hard Jam fans.įor a start, there's keyboardist Mick Talbot, something of a helpless "wally," as my lovely British wife might describe him. It's just a beautiful, breezy bit of music with an uplifting message, like a spirited bike ride down pleasantly empty, sunlit Manhattan avenues on a hot July afternoon. I mean, what the fuck happened? I think I practically spat up at my first hearing of "My Ever Changing Moods."īut, let's be honest, there is simply zero arguing with the brilliance of this single, effortlessly melding the Style Council's penchant for jazzy pop with Weller's stubbornly assertive delivery (you can take the man out of the punk band, but you can't take the punk out of the man). I mean, here was the man who'd written such incendiary barnstormers as "Eton Rifles," "In the City" and "An 'A' Bomb in Wardour Street" suddenly slipping on a pair of top siders and crooning some of the softest blue-eyed soul imaginable. I'd just graduated high school and - in my arguably narrow teenaged worldview - still regarded Paul Weller's defection from punky mod squad, The Jam, to the pointedly twee ranks of the Style Council as complete heresy. If I'm not mistaken, this single originally surfaced in the fall of 1984, but I don't believe I heard it (much less gave it a chance) until the Summer of 1985. Everyone has a list of what they consider perfect summer songs.
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